Steve Carell says Despicable Me 3 is the silliness the world needs now
IN Despicable Me 3, Steve Carell plays supervillain turned crime fighter Gru and his long-lost twin brother. But was there more money involved?
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IN Despicable Me 3, supervillain turned crime fighter Gru — voiced by friendly funnyman Steve Carell — learns he has a long-lost twin brother named Dru.
That meant twice the work for Carell. Did they pay him twice as much, too?
“They did not,” he deadpans, “but I accepted their offer.”
Gru has been part of 54-year-old Carell’s world for 10 years now, through three Despicable Me films, Minions and multiple animated shorts.
Stepping into the voice booth each time, he says, “very much feels like home”.
“They’ve been fun for me, they’ve been fun for my family,” he adds. “And when you can play it on a DVD in the back seat of the car for eight months on a loop and parents aren’t pulling their hair out, that’s a good indication that they did something right.”
Parents across Australia no doubt agree.
In Despicable Me 3, Gru, wife Lucy (Kristen Wiig) and the girls — adorable Margo, Edith and Agnes — jet off to meet Dru, who, with his full head of glossy blond hair and garage full of sports cars, appears to be thumping his twin in the game of life.
To find Dru’s voice, Carell went back to the same well he pulled Gru from.
“Gru started as a guy who I felt was dark and lonely and isolated in a lot of ways ... a bad guy with a decent heart,” he explains. “These years later, I wanted Dru to have a similar accent, but Dru is much more lighthearted, much more earnest and wide-eyed, so I tried to lighten the timbre of the voice.”
Of course, appearances can be deceiving. When it comes to the family business of villainy, Dru — who coaxes Gru into a heist — turns out to be hopeless.
“It brings up all the ideas of sibling rivalry and how brothers connect and how the grass is greener on the other side of the fence,” Carell says.
As one of four Carell boys, the actor had plenty of brotherly experience to draw on.
“My brothers and I would wrestle and fight and make up and laugh with each other and delight in each other. There’s a really specific relationship that people have with their siblings — you can be meaner to your siblings than you can to almost anyone,” he says, laughing, “because you know that relationship isn’t going anywhere; it’s there for good.
“So you don’t have to handle it with kid gloves, you can mess with that relationship. That goes for Gru and Dru; they go after each other but there’s an underlying love that isn’t going to go away.”
Gru also faces a new villain: Balthazar Bratt (voiced by South Park’s Trey Parker), a former child star still stuck in the 1980s.
The concept scatters some great ’80s pop hits across Despicable Me 3’s soundtrack, but that’s where Carell’s desire to revisit the fluoro decade ends.
“Fortunately, there’s no part of me that’s still stuck in the ’80s,” he says. “I got rid of my shoulder pads, I got rid of my Girbaud pants that snap at the bottom cuff — which I would wear as parachutey as I could — and of course my white hi-top Reeboks with the velcro pull ... I was definitely a styling ’80s guy.”
Thirty years later, he’s just “the uncool dad” to teens Elisabeth and John.
“Occasionally I’ll wear something and my 16-year-old daughter will say, ‘Hey, that’s actually cool’ — like it’s such an anomaly that I would wear something she approves of!”
Despicable Me 3 is the sixth film Carell has shared with Kristen Wiig (the pair also teamed on a brilliantly deadpan bit at this year’s Golden Globes). He says he’s always felt “a rhythm and chemistry” with Wiig; she says he’s “unbelievably funny and an incredible dramatic actor”.
Wiig is just one of many recurring players in Carell’s work life.
This September he’ll be seen again with Crazy Stupid Love co-star Emma Stone in Battle Of the Sexes, which recreates the infamous 1973 tennis match between women’s No. 1 Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.
(In the trailer, Riggs pitches the idea to King as “male chauvinist pig versus hairy-legged feminist”, but Carell reckons the chauvinist part was all an act: “That was a put-on to increase the box office for himself.”)
And he’ll reunite with The Big Short director Adam McKay to play Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld in a similarly blackly-comedic drama about George W. Bush’s Vice President Dick Cheney. (Christian Bale will play Cheney.)
“Over the years, you build a circle of people that you admire or have had great experiences with,” Carell explains. “You start friendships then you start talking about what you’d like to do and you keep in touch and you look for things to work on together.
“A lot of it is like-mindedness. Like with Adam McKay — I worked with him on the Anchorman movies, I knew him back in Chicago when we were doing theatre ... He’s always been somebody that I admired and had fun with and thought was really smart. So he calls, I’m in, you know?”
The Cheney film will start shooting in a few months. While some may think cinemagoers would want pure escapism in these politically topsy-turvy times, McKay reckons “people are craving what is really going on”.
Carell falls somewhere in the middle — believing we need fantasy just as much as we need doses of reality.
“‘What is an audience looking for?’ is a different question than ‘What does an audience need to see?’,” he points out with a laugh. “For me as an actor, I’m tending to go towards things that are lacking cynicism and have a point of view and potentially a joy to them — not necessarily a happy ending, but something that expresses decency of human behaviour. Those are the kinds of things that reflect where I am.
“This movie that I’m going to do with McKay is very political and very pointed and I think there’s a place for that. And there’s a place for outright silliness right now, which Despicable Me is a perfect example of.”
DESPICABLE ME 3 OPENS JUNE 15
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